From The Noticeably Stouter edition of ‘The Book of General Ignorance’:

There are two rhymes for orange in English, although both are proper nouns: Blorenge and Gorringe.

The Blorenge is a hill outside Abergavenny in Wales, and Gorringe is a splendid English surname

The best view of Abergavenny is from the top of the Blorenge, a 1,833 ft hill owned by the South East Wales Hang-gliding and Paragliding Club, who bought it from the Coal Authority in 1998.

Distinguished Gorringes include: General George Frederick Gorringe (1865-1945), the unpopular British First World War commander; Harry Gorringe, the first-class Australian cricketer; and Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the man who brought Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to New York’s Central Park.

In 1673, New York was called New Orange (so the New Orange became the Big Apple). The city was founded by the Dutch in 1653 as New Amsterdam, taken by the English in 1664 and renamed New York, and retaken by the Dutch in 1673 and named New Orange. It lasted less than a year. Under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 the city was ceded to the English, and New York became its permanent name.

The word ‘orange’ is a good example of what linguists call wrong word division. It derives from the Arabic naranj and arrived in English as ‘narange’ in the 14th century, gradually losing the initial ‘n’. The same process left us with apron (from naperon) and umpire (from noumpere).

Sometimes it works the other way round, as in nickname (from
an eke-name, meaning ‘also-name’) or newt (from an ewt).

Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542.